Advertisement

Advertisement

Brain compass implant gives blind rats psychic GPS

WHO needs sight when you’ve got psychic GPS? An implanted digital compass that feeds signals into the brains of blind rats has enabled them to navigate.

The result shows that rats can learn to deploy an unnatural “sense” and raises the possibility that humans could do the same. It could prompt alternative ways to treat blindness, or even equip healthy people with extra senses.

The neuroprosthesis, created by a team at the University of Tokyo in Japan, consists of a geomagnetic compass and two electrodes that fit into an animal’s brain. When the rat positioned its head within 20 degrees either side of north, the electrodes sent pulses to its right visual cortex. When the rat aligned its head in a southerly direction, the left visual cortex was stimulated. This let blind rats build a mental map of their surroundings.

During training, blind rats equipped with the compass improved at finding food rewards in a five-pronged maze, despite being released from one of three arms of the maze at random each time. After two days and 60 trials, they could navigate to the reward as fast as sighted rats could. Blind rats with no additional senses were much slower to locate the reward and didn’t show any improvement (Current Biology, DOI&colon; 10.1016/j.cub.2015.02.063).

Advertisement

“In theory, it would be possible to augment human perceptual capabilities using this approach, but many more studies in animals have to be done to justify any human study,” says Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Blind rats can navigate with a digital compass in their brains”